Written on BART

“ — Written on BART”

I don’t have much time to write publicly anymore. I do still write privately on 750words.com fairly often. Even after 5+ years, private free-writing is still one of my favorite activities. However, for better or worse, my thoughts don’t feel fully real to me unless I have some public…

Stock and Flow

From a post by Robin Sloan that he wrote 5 years ago and which I continue to think about frequently:

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three…

Intentionally Unoptimized

I love the Quantified Self movement, am a product manager for Twitter Analytics, love OKRs, and tend to frame everything in terms of metrics and data.

At the same time, I’m a huge skeptic of data-driven culture, fitness trackers, A/B testing, and the…

12 ways to change the level of water in a bathtub*

1. Turn the faucet on or off.
2. Change the price of…

The Catalog of All Things

When I was in 1st or 2nd grade my family got a World Book Encyclopedia from someone selling them door-to-door.

Ubiquitous Machine Listening and Watching

I’ve seen a few articles recently thinking through what will happen when the technology to record everything arrives. One was about whether or not toys with the ability to be “always listening” should be expected to report possible occurrences of domestic…

The Wiggle Theory

I love it when I arrive at the BART station just as a train pulls up, and there are SEATS! I take it as a good omen for the day, in the sense that the omen is part of the day, and it was good.

On Getting Stronger When Weakened

Which of these entities gets stronger when attacked and threatened?

• Cancer
• Bacteria

I think the answer is, strangely, bacteria. Cancer can be destroyed with chemo, and generally doesn’t get…